Having a website is great!
However, it doesn’t stop here.
Remember, it’s only the beginning.
Your
journey to a fruitful, rewarding and successful online venture begins
by having a website. But in the fast-paced online world you have to be
equally fast if you really want to reap the fruits of success. One such
major factor for success in the online world is
Mobile SEO or Mobile Optimization.
At this juncture, you may be little bit confused. Don’t worry. It’s
obvious. Let me make things crystal clear to you. So, simply stay with
me.
Know the Online Scenario
First and foremost, the online world is fiercely competitive. Here,
only the fittest survive. Every day thousands of new websites crop up
and each day thousands of websites die a premature death. Such is the
“cruel reality” of the World Wide Web.
Secondly, in the online
world the website visitor is the real king. So, you have to fulfill the
demands and expectations of your website visitor so that he or she can
be converted to a customer. Until and unless the demands and
expectations of your online visitor are not fulfilled, he or she will
simply shun your website forever. And this will hardly take few seconds.
So, this means that you just have few initial seconds in which you have
to convince your website visitor that you are the perfect resource for
him or her.
Thus, you have to come out as a winner and should be
successful in winning the hearts of your online visitor. This will be
the game changer for you in the online world.
The “Big” Question
Now, you would be wondering how this will happen?
Yes, this is the “Big” question.
Well,
let me tell you that there is no simple formula. Yet there are ways in
which you can drive visitors, engage visitors, and finally convert your
visitor into a happy and loyal customer. In this context, making your
website mobile-friendly holds a special place. As things stands now, if
your website is not optimized for mobile devices such as Smartphones and
Tablets, you simply will end up losing business. This means that you
have to take “mobile explosion” really seriously and adopt such
practices that make your website mobile friendly.
The Key Focus – Mobile SEO and Mobile Optimization
This
leads us to discover the “practices” which need to follow to make a
website mobile-friendly. These practices can easily be clubbed into
Mobile SEO and Mobile Optimization.
As a website owner you have to pay attention for Mobile Optimization and go on to follow Mobile
SEO Techniques
so that your website becomes really fit for handling search engine
traffic from mobile devices. Moreover, Google’s latest algorithm tweak
critically focuses on seeing that your website supports mobile friendly
search or not. If your website doesn’t meet its specifications, your
website rankings take a serious dip; you lose out on visitor traffic
from search engine which erodes your business returns from the online
platform.
So, you have to make sure that you follow a perfect Mobile SEO Strategy and have Mobile Optimization.
How to Get Started
To
help you with Mobile SEO and Mobile Optimization, I hereunder list down
various techniques of making your website mobile friendly so that your
visitors find your website thoroughly engaging when they hook on to
their mobile devices and surf your website. With Mobile Optimization,
you ensure that your visitors experience optimized performance when they
access your site from their mobile devices. It fine tunes areas such as
site design, site structure, page speed and number of other factors
make sure that your mobile visitors don’t shun your website and look for
other resources online.
There are some key characteristics which
make a website mobile friendly or mobile optimized. For instance, a site
is said to be mobile friendly when it …..
When it presents content well on a mobile device
does not require zooming
is easily readable on various screen sizes
is easily navigable
is helpful for mobile audience
is properly understood by Google
It
is important that you start mobile optimization as soon as you can and
also make sure that Google understands it so that your site gets
appropriately ranked by Google which ultimately helps you in gaining
traffic to your site from mobile devices.
Your Mobile SEO Guide
So, here’s your Mobile SEO Guide – The Best Mobile
SEO Practices:
(This guide illustrates the steps and techniques of making your website
mobile friendly in accordance with Google documentation.)
1. Page Speed: Page
Speed is critical for mobile users. For getting optimal page speed you
need to optimize images, get to minify code, leverage browser caching
and also reduce the number of redirects. These are essential points
which you need to follow for getting optimal page speed for your
website.
2. Stop Blocking CSS, JavaScript, or Images: If
you are one of those webmasters who block one or all these three
elements for your mobile site, then for Mobile SEO purposes you need to
stop doing it. Now, mobile devices support all of these elements and the
Smartphone GoogleBot wants to see and categorize the same content that
users do. So don’t hide CSS, JavaScript or Images. These elements also
help Google recognize that your website is responsive or different
mobile solution.
3. Mobile Site Design: Mobile
devices have revolutionized the way sites are being designed. For having
Mobile SEO Website, webmasters need to pay take care of certain
specific issues such as:
Don’t Use Flash: The
plug-in may not be available on your user’s mobile device which
translates that they would be missing out the fun. So, when you want to
have special effects, use HTML5 instead.
Don’t Use Pop-ups:
Using Pop-ups on your mobile device leads to high bounce rate. It is a
really a nuisance to try and close these on a mobile device.
Adopt Website Design for the Fat Finger: To avoid accidental clicks on touch screen navigation create website design for the fat finger.
4. Don’t Forget to Optimize Titles and Meta Descriptions:
Mobile devices provide less screen space for searching. So as a thumb
rule to show your best work in SERPs you should be as concise as
possible when coming out with Titles, URLs, and Meta Descriptions.
5. Have Schema.org structured Data: The limited screen space is the basic reason why search results with
rich snippets is even more likely to stand out on mobile search than on a desktop search.
6. Don’t Forget to Optimize for Local Search:
If you are running a business which has a local element to it, then
don’t forget to optimize your mobile content for local search. This
calls for standardizing your name, address, phone number and also
requires you to include your city and state name in your website’s
metadata.
7. Mobile Site Configuration:
Responsive Design, Dynamic Serving, Separate Mobile URL: This is easily
the most important factor when doing Mobile SEO. So, when setting your
site you have to decide whether you would like to go for Responsive
Design, Dynamic Serving or separate site configuration.
However,
let me tell you that Google prefers Responsive Design. Having a website
which adopts Responsive Design makes sure that the website content
automatically adapt to the screen size of user’s mobile device and so
you can serve the same content to mobile and desktop users. It makes
sure that users get a website that is capable of adapting the content
according to their devices.
Whereas, in dynamic serving you can
display different content to mobile visitors than you do for desktop
visitors. This is done using the Vary HTTP Header. So, the content
displayed will vary based on the user agent which requests the page.
Then
you can even go for having a second parallel site for mobile users. So
you can have completely customized content for mobile visitors. Here, to
avoid URL confusion, in your parallel mobile site you can use “m”
subdomain. However, you have to make sure that your site redirects are
all in place and need to set up rel= “canonical” so as to avoid
duplicate content issues.
Final Words
The above Mobile SEO Guide explicitly explains what you need to do to
achieve Mobile SEO or Mobile Optimization. It is a must that you make
your site mobile friendly so as to properly cater the requirements and
aspirations of your mobile visitors. Remember, you cannot ignore mobile
visitors so it is better for you to get things done as far as
Mobile SEO or Mobile Optimization is concerned.
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